Sinn Fein Endorses Plan for Protestant-Catholic Police Force

By EAMON QUINN

Published: January 29, 2007

Sinn Fein, the main Catholic republican party in Northern Ireland, voted Sunday to endorse the police force in the divided province, opening the way toward restoring local rule through a government shared by Protestants and Catholics.

Sinn Fein's leaders, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, won approval to support a police force that would move over the next 15 years from being a Protestant-dominated body to one where Catholics and Protestants are represented in proportion to the makeup of the province's population.

An overwhelming majority of the 900 delegates who had gathered here voted to endorse the force after six hours of discussions.

The vote signals a shift in the thinking of the Irish republicans, who since 1922 have distrusted the police, courts and prisons in Northern Ireland as institutions of British rule.

Sinn Fein has long regarded the Northern Ireland police force as an armed force that had allied with British soldiers to maintain British rule in the province.

The vote on Sunday allows the British and Irish governments to move ahead in coming days with plans to persuade the Northern Ireland Protestants, led by the Rev. Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, to share power with Sinn Fein Catholics in a Belfast-based government.

Tony Blair, the British prime minister, and Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister, praised the vote. They are to meet Tuesday in London to discuss plans to restore local rule to the province.

Under the British-Irish plan to begin transferring power from Britain to local rule, known as the St. Andrews Agreement proposals, Sinn Fein's pledge to endorse the Northern Ireland police force was necessary for the Democratic Unionists to consider giving their support to a shared government.

Democratic Unionists, like most Protestants in the province, seek to maintain links to Britain. A Protestant-Catholic local government, set forth in the Good Friday peace accord of 1998, last met in 2002 before it fell apart amid widespread distrust between the rival political groups.

The Irish Republican Army, an ally of Sinn Fein, fought the Northern Ireland police and the British Army in a military campaign to unite Ireland until an I.R.A. cease-fire in 1994. Four years later, the Good Friday peace accord mostly ended the kind of politically motivated killings that marked the previous three decades. The conflict killed more than 3,600 people, including 300 police officers.

Under that 1998 agreement, Catholic representation on the police force is to increase to about 42 percent, the percentage of Catholics living in the province.

The British-Irish accord proposes elections for a Belfast-based assembly on March 7 and the establishment of a Protestant-Catholic provincial government on March 26.

To meet those deadlines, the support of Mr. Paisley, who has opposed sharing power with Catholic republicans in the past, will be needed.

Senior politicians in the Democratic Unionist Party have said in recent months that they oppose sharing power with Sinn Fein under any circumstances.

In a speech to Sinn Fein delegates on Sunday, Mr. McGuinness made it clear that after his party's ''historic'' vote, he expected Mr. Blair to put pressure on Mr. Paisley's Democratic Unionists to agree to share power.

Speaking to reporters after the vote, Mr. McGuinness said he hoped that ''the spirit of generosity shown today'' by his party would be matched by the Democratic Unionists.

In the weeks leading up to the vote, Sinn Fein leaders worked to ease any dissent among their members by holding a series of public meetings to explain that their support for the police force would allow them to re-enter a Belfast government.

The gathering on Sunday, attended by 2,500 delegates and supporters, was larger than those Sinn Fein had held to win support for the Good Friday accord.

Many speakers mentioned the publication last week of a report by the police ombudsman of Northern Ireland that accused members of the province's police force of collusion with at least one loyalist Protestant gang in a number of killings, attacks and drug crimes in the decade that ended in 2003.

Party leaders had feared that the report would jeopardize the vote on the police force, but most delegates spoke strongly in favor of endorsing the force.